Martine Franck's Curious Lens

By

Tobias Grey

October 21, 2011

For Martine Franck, every portrait starts with a conversation. Ever since the Belgian-born photographer first picked up a camera as a shy young woman, she has always used photography as a way of getting closer to people.

ENLARGE

Martine Franck
Corbis

"I never really dared to go up to people and talk to them," says Ms. Franck. "I started by taking wedding photographs. Then, when I went to parties, I would take my camera with me, just to give myself a sense of composure, or a necessity to be there."

At the age of 73, Ms Franck, who has become one of the world's best-known women photojournalists under the aegis of the Magnum Photos agency, still retains an insatiable curiosity about people that can only be entirely satisfied with a camera—usually a Leica—in her hands.

Ms. Franck's admiration for the lives of artists is at the root of her latest solo exhibition titled "Venus d'ailleurs, peintres et sculpteurs à Paris depuis 1945" (From other lands, painters and sculptors in Paris since 1945), which is on display at Paris's Maison Européenne de la Photographie until Jan. 8.

In the show are 62 of Ms. Franck's geometrically precise, often playful, black-and-white portraits of foreign artists who have lived and worked in Paris since World War II. The photographs, part of an ongoing project, are also available in a book, "From Other Lands: Artists in Paris," published in an English-language version by the Imprimerie Nationale.

Some of the artists featured, like the Belgian-born Pierre Alechinsky, the Colombian Fernando Botero, the Swiss Diego Giacometti or the German Anselm Kiefer, are familiar names, though many others are less well-known. The oldest portrait in the show, and one of Ms. Franck's most treasured, dates back to 1980. It shows the late Russian-born Modernist master Marc Chagall sitting in his garden in Vence, on the Côte d'Azur, bursting with vitality at the age of 92 as he avidly fixes the camera. "He was a seductive man," recalls Ms. Franck. "I think he was amused to be photographed by a woman. There is a certain amount of seduction that arises with photography when you're meeting somebody for the first time."

At the age of 27, Ms. Franck was introduced to the pioneering French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (30 years her senior) by a mutual friend in Paris. According to Ms. Franck, who at that time was photographing the Paris fashion shows for the New York Times, one of the first things Cartier-Bresson did was ask to see her contact sheets. "He always judged a photographer by looking at their contact sheets upside down to see the composition of a photo," recalls Ms. Franck.

In 1970, the couple married and soon afterward had a daughter called Melanie. Their marriage lasted until Cartier-Bresson's death in 2004 at the age of 95. A year before her husband's death Ms. Franck and her daughter established the Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, which continues to promote the work of photojournalism's founding father.

Born in Antwerp in 1938, the daughter of Evelyn Franck and Louis Franck, a successful merchant banker who was made a colonel during the war, Ms. Franck spent her early childhood years in the U.S. before moving to England in 1944 "with the V2 bombs still raining down."

Both her mother and father were art collectors, who encouraged their daughter to visit galleries from an early age. Her grandfather, also a collector, was an amateur photographer whose death provided her with a cautionary tale.

"I never actually knew him," she says. "But, I heard he died taking photographs of his grandchildren on the dike in Ostend. He backed up and fell off the dike and killed himself. I'm very wary of backing up now because you're so concentrated on what you're seeing."

Ms. Franck, who attended Heathfield School, an all-girls boarding school near Ascot in England, began to study the history of art from the age of 14. "I had a wonderful teacher who really galvanized me," she says. "In those days she took us on outings to London, which was the big excitement of the year for me."

Though Ms. Franck continued her history of art studies, first at the University of Madrid, then L'Ecole du Louvre, she says she was never tempted to become a painter. Her awakening as a photographer arrived on a tour of the Orient with her close friend Ariane Mnouchkine, who went on to found the experimental Theatre de Soleil.

"That's when I realized I wanted to become a photographer," she says. "I bought my first camera in Japan. We also traveled in Cambodia and India. Ariane was quite a good photographer—she photographed everything which was in movement and I would photograph everything that was static."

Even today, Ms. Franck is still afraid of taking fuzzy pictures. Her best photographs tend to be ones where there is little movement and infinite expression, with a particular focus on faces and hands, which make her such an ideal portraitist. "I think [Cartier-Bresson] liked my portraits," she says, dropping her habitual modesty for a moment.

A fascination for other cultures, the theater, the elderly and the hermetic world of artists are all linked to her "need" to pierce the mysteries of worlds that are all too frequently ignored by most mainstream media.

"When you have contact with human beings [as a photographer]," she says, "I think it's very important to be able to forget yourself and listen to what others have to say."

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